Sonia Husid, better known by her penname, N.M. Seedo, was an important sitter in Kossoff’s early career. Born in 1906, Seedo was two decades older than Kossoff, yet they formed a warm friendship that emerged over the course of many long sittings. The first of these took place in 1952 at Kossoff’s studio in Mornington Crescent. As was to become his common practice, he started to work from Seedo by drawing her in charcoal and pastel. Her book, In The Beginning was Fear, gives a fictionalised account of posing for Kossoff. 'The struggle he was engaged in in his work was nerve-racking, he seemed to go through heaven and hell, falling in love with every happy stroke of the brush, and hating all the obstacles, all the distortions and misleading paths that the canvas, paint and brush put in his way to some unknown goal.' In contrast with Kossoff’s later drawings, this early drawing suggests a slower, more contemplative mode of execution. By working away at a single drawing, Kossoff began to build an internal image of his sitter. As he explained to David Sylvester in a letter from 1995, ‘I used to be much more obsessively concerned with trying to finish one thing at a time.’ With each moment at work on a drawing, the image would grow in his mind and, though never a predictable event, he inched his way towards a moment of transformative comprehension. The first such moment occurred when he finished his first drawing of Seedo in 1952. Kossoff later described it is an instant ‘when time seems to collapse’, also referring to this quality elsewhere as ‘thereness’ – an epiphany about the reality of the sitter before him. This transformative experience marks the completion of a work, and only works that leave the studio may be regarded as finished. Accordingly, this Seedo drawing represents a moment of internal completion for Kossoff – a point at which the image revealed something new to him about his subject. As with all Leon Kossoff’s work, rather than consider the literal fact of the artwork alone, the artwork should be considered alongside corresponding changes in his emotional life which happen in the course of making a work. ‘I stop when it’s impossible to go on with’, he has written, alluding to the way his mood shifts over the course of a single piece.